In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the computer company Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, sent the first ever email. It was initally an experiment to see if he could get two computers to exchange a message. It was Ray who decided to use the @ symbol to seperate the recipient's name from their location. The first ever email message was: 'QWERTYUIOP'.About Raymond Samuel Tomlinson
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (born 1941) is a programmer who implemented an email system in 1971 on the ARPANet. Email had been previously sent on other networks such as AUTODIN. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPAnet (previously, mail could only be sent to others who used the same computer). To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user from their machine, which has been used in email addresses ever since.
The first email sent by him is not preserved and had content he describes as insignificant, something like "QWERTYUIOP". This is commonly misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP".
At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to a colleague, he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."
He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a long-time employee of Bolt, Beranek and Newman.
